Well, well, well.
Look who's back after more than a month without posting.
What excuse could he possibly have for such negligence.
There's nothing he could say that would make you forgi-
I was on my HONEYMOON you demanding people. Yes, it was great thank you for asking. And yes, that is me in a Mario-esque drift cart. If you ever get the chance to ride one, you should. I swallowed a tremendous amount of dust because I was laughing so hard.
But I'm back now, and I even did a tiiiiny bit of comics work while I was away. Namely chatting with Vicky about Issue #1's cover. You can see two of the (still awesome) concepts that we decided against in today's cover image. I'm not going to share any pics of the one we did land on because I want to be able to do a proper cover reveal when everything's ready, but I'm very excited to see what she does with it and also excited about the potential uses for some of the ideas that we didn't end up using as a cover. Maybe there's a poster in there somewhere...
As it stands. I'm hoping to have the finished and formatted comic ready to go by the start of next month. You can get a sneak peek at the first few pages on the Bindings app here. And make sure to subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss any updates.
The holiday was a great opportunity to think about what's next as well as finishing off issue #1. I've got a near-finished draft of issue #2 that I'm quite proud of, and a rough-out of issue #3. This first PuddleJumpers arc that I have in mind is planned to come in at #7 issues, and my goal is to have all 7 of them at least planned out before issues 2 starts being drawn. The reason for this is that, while issue #1 was written as a vignette that could stand on its own as a bit of a taster (I've heard people talk about these as 'issue 0's sometimes), it spawned a larger story that I want to make sure feels coherent and complete before I lock myself in with art. Having only ever written prose before now that's quite a different experience, but I like it. If anything my impatience and desire not to be the person holding up cool new art has been a really strong motivator.
I've also got some ideas for smaller-scale, one or two-page black and white comics that will give you readers more of an insight into the wider PuddleJumpers world. How things fit together, how they became like that in the first place, and some of the different stories and characters that I could move into after this series is completed should I get the chance. I'll be workshopping those gently in the background while we get this first issue over the finish line, and hopefully you'll hear more about it afterwards.
That's all for today. I'm glad to be back, excited about the coming weeks, and looking forward to sharing more with you.